Weekly Poem: 'Ex Libris'

**By Megan Harlan** Here is the fossil as a perfume. Here is a bone picked clean and whittled into a tiny tall ship. Here are magicians teaching secrets to contortionists. Here is colored glass on fire. Here is love broken into vowels and a shrug. Here is scripture forged into the memory of water. Here are rosettes, exposed wiring, teasings onto the brink. Here is the full vista of an hour, and the sun.   "Megan Harlan's":http://www.meganharlan.com/ first book of poems, "Mapmaking," ("BkMk Press":http://cas.umkc.edu/bkmk/ /University of Missouri) won the 2009 John Ciardi Prize. Her work has appeared in many journals, including American Poetry Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, TriQuarterly, Prairie Schooner and AGNI Online. Her short stories and nonfiction have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Sycamore Review, the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle and Salon, among others. She lives in Berkeley, Calif., with her husband and son.